Indievidual making a game for everybody.

Games

10/28/2014

A probably rambling explanation of where the idea came from for Platfinity, and how it developed into what it is. I have noticed that people were not that sure what Platfinity is, or what it does, and I thought I should write a bit more about it in case anyone is curious enough to read about it and learn a little more about it, how it ticks, and why. This isn't going to be sales text, so if you're wanting me to talk you into buying it, you'll have to scroll down to the bottom and click on the link to buy it. While you're downloading it, scroll back up here and read this. I'll wait.

OK, then. I was reading an article written by one of the people who worked on Legend of Grimrock. He was talking about how he was able to edit the game while he was playing it. He could go into the code, change a bit of code, and the game would automatically update and he would be playing the changed code, without having to wait while the game recompiled. I thought this was an incredible idea, and I was jealous of that feature, having to go make a tiny tweak to my game – at the time I was working on a shmup – and then rebuild the code before I could see if a 5% change was the right amount or 7% would have been better, and then try it again with the other number. Anyway, the shmup crashed and burned on the altar of your-graphics-aren't-good-enough-so-who-cares-if-the-game-plays-great-and-is-lots-of-fun, so I went back to the drawing board. We all saw MineCraft and how everyone loved it and I thought well, obviously, it's just Legos with you walking on top of the blocks. So I got thinking about how everyone loves platform games and thought, what if you could do the same thing in a platform game? What if you were in the game, running around, but you could change it around the character? What if you could change the character? So I started thinking about how to reduce a platform game to its simplest components, like the essence of what a platform game is.

I was very inspired by the Platformance games, Platformance Castle Pain and Platformance Temple Death. They were both single screen games that could zoom out to show the whole level, or zoom in to show a closeup view, focusing the camera on the character. The also rely on a popular platform game mechanic, checkpoints. When the character is defeated, they go back to the last checkpoint. There are unlimited lives, and the challenge becomes completing the level at all, and then completing it with the least number of deaths. This quick restarting mechanic is used in Super Meat Boy, and about a billion other games. It allows very challenging areas that just wouldn't be fun to play if you had to run through the whole level to get to the part you were stuck on.

Having figured out the essence of what a checkpoint based platform game was, I started figuring out what elements to include, and what to cut out. I wanted the game to be as fun, user friendly and easy to use, that my daughter, who was four years old at the time, would be able to use it. I also wanted it to be powerful enough that what you could do with it would be nearly unlimited. I came up with the idea of the Toolbox. You simply Right-Click your mouse or press the T key to open up the Toolbox. Click on something in the Toolbox, and then click in the game to place it. Move the character and you're playing again, click the mouse and you're editing, move the character and you're back to playing. Everything pauses when you edit, and resumes when you move the character.

Everything in Platfinity is drawn in order, so each layer is drawn to the screen and then covered with the next layer. This way you can sandwich your character in between the background and foreground, so he or she or it can walk in front of a wall or into a building and look out the window at you. You can edit the background or simply load a background you have made. The Background is 1920x1080, or 60 tiles by 34 tiles. It doesn't matter what your screen resolution is set to, Platfinity automatically changes its resolution to match your computer, and scrolls to the edges if there is more to see. It also knows better than to show the black area on the sides, and if your character or your mouse cursor goes there, the screen stops scrolling. The next layer is Background Tiles, as it's a lot easier to fill in the background or sections of the background with tiles. Next up is the Normal Tiles. These are the tiles on the same level as the character, can be any shape, and have collision with the character. In short, the character 'walks' on these tiles. Special Tiles are tiles that do something when the character touches them, like checkpoints, ladders, warp points and the like. You change the Properties of the tile to change what the tile does. Hazard Tiles are any tile that hurts the character, like spikes or lava. Platforms, Moving Hazards, and Rotating Hazards are Objects, meaning each one of them is a separate entity. Each tile in the game shares the same properties as any other tile like it in the Toolbox. Each Object in the game has its Properties set up when placed on the game screen. Platforms can move and can be placed anywhere, not just on a the grid like tiles. Moving Hazards can be placed anywhere and move, Rotating Hazards are similar but rotate, so you can have stuff like pendulums and sawblades or out of control Ferris Wheels. The character graphics, like anything else in the game, can be changed into anything you want. Animation frames were limited on purpose, so people could focus on the fun of making a character, instead of drawing a ton of pictures over and over. Foreground Tiles go in front of everything, and if their colors are transparent, the player can look through and see the character , so you can make windows, or water, or haze, or an old TV effect, like I did in the first part of 8 Bit Love Affair. You can add your own sounds and music as well. Graphics can be edited with the easy to use paint tools provided, or loaded from the disk. The game automatically saves your work when you quit the program, and when you start it again, it loads everything back in just as it was. To share a game, you simply copy the game folder. When you run Platfinity, the game will be there in the load menu.

People have said they aren't sure what Platfinity is, is it software, is it a game maker, is it a game? And I guess the answer is it's all of the above. It's like Pinball Construction Set and Platformance had a baby. It's like RPG Maker for platform games, it's like Game Maker with all the boring and un-fun parts taken out. It's a game that you play while you make it. It's like drawing your own game. It's a platform game with infinite levels. It's a game, it's a construction set, it's a game creation system, it's a toy. It's something different, and I think, something very cool. I think we've got to the point where all games are fitting neatly into a genre or a category, and people don't know what to do with something they can't immediately understand and compartmentalize. It's kind of like asking what do you make with Legos? The answer is whatever you want.

Over the years, so many people have told me they wanted to make a video game or computer game. I believe that most people have ideas for making games. If people know you make games, they usually ask how you do that or how did you get into that or what do I need to learn to make games? So I hope what I have made gives some people a chance to make their own game, or another way to be creative, or another toy to play with. I've made a few demo games with Platfinity, because I wanted to show what it can do, and some of the effects you could achieve with it. But I'm really mostly interested in what people like you out there will make with it. I'm sure there are things I never thought to do with it, and adventures you can create that will blow me, and everyone else, away! And I'm looking forward to playing them :)

07/17/2014

Just a small one this time. Sometimes I have stuff in my head and it's nice to post it somewhere just to get it out :)

Upgrade items and their effect on gameplay----------------------------------------------------

As I see it, an upgrade item such as those given with a pre-order or other day-one DLC option has one of three possible effects on gameplay.

1. Item has no effect on gameplay.

2. The item makes the game easier.

3. Without the item, the game is too hard.

1. In case one, the item could just be cosmetic, but if the item does not give at least a perceived advantage, why would the player want the item?

2. In case two, the item makes the game easier. Often these items make games, which are already tuned to be completable by the largest number of players, too easy.

3. In case three, the game has been tuned to be too hard without the item to encourage players to purchase the item. The danger in this case is that the player will become frustrated with the game and stop playing it instead of paying for the upgrade item. This type of players are likely to give a game low scores or complain about the game on forums.

I believe the only viable option, and the one chosen by 95% of developers, will be option two: makes the game easier. The pitfall here is that some players will be put off by the too-easy difficulty. This must however be a minor concern, as players rarely complain if a game is too easy or an item they are using is overpowered. The evidence of this is pretty much every multi-player game, where players routinely spawn camp new players and obliterate them with superior equipment and skills. No one in online games ever seems to complain that the 'noobz' are too easy to kill.

02/06/2014

So, talking to people recently, I have noticed there are a variety of different feelings about 'cloned' games and even more varied opinion about whether or not certain games even are clones. I'm afraid it isn't going to be easy to ever come to consensus on what a clone is, and it will inevitably become a quagmire of argument, so I will side-step that part of the discussion by simply saying you know one when you see it. You can have a cartoon of a duck, a stuffed animal of a duck, or a photograph of a duck. I hope we all agree those are 'ducks'.

Instead of getting lost in semantics, I'm not going to talk about what clones are, I'm going to talk about why they are bad. I frequently see statements to effect "So what is Dumb Bird is a clone of Stupid Bird? How does that hurt anybody? How is that hurting the game industry?" I'm glad you asked.

In the process of making a game, What is the difference between making a completely new game, versus remaking or copying Space Invaders, for instance? The difference is we already have Space Invaders, it already exists, so any time we have a question about how our game should look or how it should play, we just look at Space Invaders. How fast should the bullets go? How fast do they

go in Space Invaders? How fast should the aliens walk? How fast do they walk in Space Invaders? No one is ever accused of cloning football when they make a videogame of football. That is because football exists and the point of computer football is to copy football as closely and as entertainingly as possible.

Most game developers can make a Space Invaders game pretty quickly, and the same goes for cloning a farming game. All of the design questions are figured out, all of the game feel should be the same as the successful example. So it is much quicker to make the copy, as there is no pre-production, no figuring out how to do anything, no experimenting and failing. No prototype to build. The prototype is the game you're copying. There are no failed mechanics or features that need to be cut, as every mechanic and feature was tested in the other game. So what is it that a cloner has stolen?

R&D. Research and Development. The original game creator has spent hours, months, even years working out gameplay, formulas, graphics proportions, and a myriad of other things that pretty much nobody but a game developer knows about or can see. From the initial idea, to the game mechanics design, to the layout of the game, to the way it actually plays, all of these things take time and effort when creating something new. It's this time and effort that is being stolen. Cloners do zero R&D. They just look at whatever the best selling thing is, and copy it the easiest way they can. There is no honor in this. It's about as morally bankrupt as you can get. It's not illegal. That doesn't mean it isn't wrong.

So who is to blame for all of this? Why are cloned games so successful? Why do they often make more than the games they are stolen from?

Most users don't know what a clone is. If the game is a copy of an older game, they have most likely never seen or even heard of the older game. Many of these people have only a few games. They do not recognize game mechanics from other games because they have simply not played other games. When shown a game and its clone side by side, they often do not see the similarities. They

will point out any difference. "This one is ninjas and that one is pirates!" They will defend the game they like, the one they play. Especially if it is the clone. It's a fool's errand to try and educate the users about this issue, because they simply do not care.

The users don't care if a game is a clone.

The users don't care if a game is a clone.

Yes, I wrote that twice, that's how important this statement is.

The users don't care if a game is a clone.

Read that statement over and over until you have internalized its message. You know who cares if games are clones? Game developers. My informal research suggests it may be only game developers that care. And I'm pretty sure game developers aren't the cloner's target market.

And it is the users that ultimately spend the money that makes a game successful. It is the users that ignore a game and make it a failure. Like it or not, all of the games that you love, the ones that you talk about with your friends and have inspired you in your own game development, were all successful. They are the ones you've heard of because they made money. They were successful because people liked them and spent money on them.

So what to do? Giving up is certainly an option. That's what I feel like doing when I see a really dumb phone game or a clone game attain massive success. Become a cloner yourself? That's nothing I've ever wanted to do. What's the point of making games if you aren't going to contribute anything? There is no easy answer. For me, I guess I will just keep making my games, trying to make something new, trying to further the art form in some way, watching others copy my work and find more (monetary) success than I do. But hey, if my game is well known enough to be copied, then I must have done something right! I hope you enjoy my games. I hope in thirty years people will talk about them fondly like we do about 80s arcade games today.

01/23/2012

My new game, Plethora 2012 Disclosure will be out soon!The official release date is now "when it's done" :)

I'm in finishing mode now. Plethora won't be released until it's done and it's fun! All of the enemies are in now, and most of the levels. Bosses are coming along. Graphics are in flux right now, lots of placeholders still in there so I've not been too good about screenshots. When I get a good playable with all my own graphics there will be screenshots and some youtube. I'm not sure how anyone does the blogging and twittering and game dev at the same time. I tend to get quiet when I'm working hard. I'm still planning a first quarter release! If you'd like to be a beta tester, get in touch :)